Language

Post-apocalyptic linguistics

Tomorrow's English

THE WORLD ended today. (I'm writing this before the end of the workday, so I could be wrong.) If it did end: congratulations on surviving! What language do you speak? What about your comrades? Are there any traces of written language left? If you're still speaking and reading standard English, give it some time. The futurists think you or your children will be using language differently soon enough.

For instance, David Mitchell, the author of Cloud Atlas, had some ideas of what English might look like in a few hundred years. The last of the novel's six stories takes place in a post-apocalyptic Hawaii, "after the Fall". The chapter begins:

Many writers have played around with word spellings in order to evoke dialects. Mark Twain wrote in this sort of "eye dialect", Charles Dickens did it too, and Mr Mitchell did it for his new English. Halle Berry and Tom Hanks brought Cloud Atlas's future-Hawaiian-speak to life in the October film version of the novel. Their dialogue was less dialectal than the written form. This was probably for listeners who didn't have the luxury to reread the text to figure out what Mr Hanks's fellow tribesmen were getting at. Mr Mitchell's words read earthy, sounding more old than new.

Of course, Mr Hanks's character lives in a village. Ms Berry's character, who traveled to the islands on a sleek ship, apparently speaks in standard American English. She code-switches to the Hawaiian dialect when she arrives. Another Cloud Atlas story takes place in a futuristic Korea, but the actors in those scenes speak standard English with a hint of a Korean accent. Mr Mitchell uses standard English in those chapters, too.

So what's going on? Science fiction movies almost all use dialogue that we'd recognise: see Blade Runner or the Star Wars films, for example. Surely this is partly out of convenience. English-speaking audiences are loath to watch a subtitled film. Reading an unknown language isn't an option. Inventing a language is a tough job, too. Perhaps we can imagine that the filmmakers and authors are translating the dialogue just as they'd show Germans speaking English with a German accent. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy skirted the issue by inventing the Babel Fish, which conveniently slurps through the ear canal to translate any language. George Orwell's 1984 and Ayn Rand's Anthem used 20th-century English with changes only in vocabulary, not grammar or (apparently) pronunciation.

These books and movies are entertaining but don't get us closer to imagining a future language. English changed dramatically over the last thousand years. It's changed over the last twenty years, too. Our language today has ancestors and cousins that are nearly unintelligible to lay English-speakers. It makes sense to imagine that 2200's English or 3000's English will look strange to us as well—if English survives. After all, if there's an apocalypse today, which languages will remain? English is spoken by hundreds of millions, but it's not the most spoken first language. It's the most far-flung, but an apocalyptic event might not be geographically choosy. (Was it, dear survivor?) Written English has complicated the language's evolution. It's sped up changes, especially through the Internet. It has expanded its global reach. But it has also frozen some grammar rules, spellings, and writing styles. In a multicultural new world, English might creolise. A particular nonstandard accent could become a prestige form. If a literate English-speaking population has access to English writing after an apocalypse, maybe the language wouldn't change so much. More likely, a group of stressed survivors would have more pressing matters to attend to than dangling participles.

So much depends on the events that await English tomorrow or two hundred years from now. This is no surprise: English is what it is today because of a thousand quirks of history, not any intelligent process. For science fiction writers, predicting tomorrow's English is easier because they've also laid out the events that shape its development. In some books, like 1984 and Anthem, language change plays an important role. In most other books and movies, language is just a bother to be ignored. But that's not so bad. Even the most skilled linguists can only speculate about change. But perhaps you, my post-apocalyptic reader, have a special insight into tomorrow's English. What's it like, then?

Surely the easier and more wide spread communication becomes, the LESS likely 'creolisation' is? We are already seeing this with the decline of regional dialects of languages, not just English in the UK and US, but also with languages like German and Russian. With nation wide (and international) distribution of TV shows, newspapers and of course, internet content, the last century has seen increasing standardisation of languages, especially English. So I'd submit that unless we turn our backs on the wider world and go back to communicating mostly with our local regions, English (and most other major languages) will become much less provincial, not more so.

Surely the easier and more wide spread communication becomes, the LESS likely 'creolisation' is? We are already seeing this with the decline of regional dialects of languages, not just English in the UK and US, but also with languages like German and Russian. With nation wide (and international) distribution of TV shows, newspapers and of course, internet content, the last century has seen increasing standardisation of languages, especially English. So I'd submit that unless we turn our backs on the wider world and go back to communicating mostly with our local regions, English (and most other major languages) will become much less provincial, not more so.

Well, there was no apocalypse today, so let's imagine what English would be like in a non-apocalyptic future.

English underwent no ground-shattering change since Shakespeare. What an Elizabethan English-speaker wrote in the 16th century is eminently readable today by anyone with a reasonable degree of education. And if what linguists say about contemporary English pronunciation holds true as well, verbal communication shouldn't be difficult either.

And also remember that for most of the last 500 years, there was no uniform public education system anywhere, drilling into young minds a certain form of English as being the 'standard' one. Today, we have that system, and I don't see it ending its role anytime soon. Scope for major linguistic transformation is thus reduced even more.

The Internet? A worldwide meeting of cultures? Their impact as an agent of change is grossly exaggerated. The Internet will in fact aggregate all varieties of English and impose a global standard, which will act as a unifying factor and not in any way leading to splinter-ization or creolization. And a multicultural society will lead to pidgins being created in our streets? Empirical evidence suggests that immigrant proficiency in their native tongues (incl. Spanish) sharply drop after the second generation. English may borrow a couple of words from foreign languages, as it has done for centuries, but the overall structure is not going to change. That's just not how the linguistic power-structure works.

Overall, the boring conclusion is that English will not change in any significant way within the next couple of centuries.

It's not only the language per se, unfortunately some old uses and traditions will be lost for many new English speakers and for many of the native ones as well. Some examples:

1) Ships (and even airplanes) have always been considered women, ladies. It would be unconceivable, disrespectful and impersonal to refer to the Titanic as "it", the correct thing is to say that SHE sank and that many of her passengers and crewmen saw HER while she was sinking. The aircraft carrier USS Yorktown CV-10, (1943- ) was affectionately known as "The Fighting Lady". http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=37Mjbw0GBog (fellow film buffs: does the score sound familiar? ;-) Alas, more and more people will ignore this, or think that it's sexist, or apply a purely grammatical —and soulless—logic.

2) Same thing for countries, especially the oldest ones, like England/United Kingdom, France, Spain, Germany, Russia, etc, those which have old female personifications. Britannia, Marianne, Hispania, Germania, Russia... are goddesses, matrons or maids and are obviously referred to as she and her. This drawing was designed by Kaiser Wilhelm II himself in 1895,http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Voelker_Europas.jpg
And this is a Russian poste from 1914, which is why Russia is in the centre... Some people still refer to some countries using the female gender, but the impersonal "it" is gradually winning.

3) Vocabulary. Thousands of old words will disappear to make space for the newer ones or because they are no longer used or understood. Words like hobbledehoy, querulent, asteism, logogogue (very appropriate here!), &c. Also, catachresis, malapropisms and solecisms will be common.

4) Latin, especially plurals. There was a time when one of the ways to ascertain someone's real education and culture was their use of plurals when writing Latin words often used in English. People who wrote curriculums, addendums, vertexes, spectrums, data (referred to a single datum), etc suggested either a lack of education or sheer indifference concerning these matters, but since both ways are considered correct this "filter" is no longer possible. What is unfair is that now those who always respected Latin and wrote plurals correctly are seen by some people as pedants, but I am among those who think that Latin may be a dead language, but there is no need to bury it six feet deep and forget it, so I will keep writing curricula, addenda, vertices and....spectra—including James Bond's.

I agree with another commenter's conclusion: English will not change in a significant way in the foreseeable future, though it will no doubt continue to evolve as it always has, as all languages always do. The internet will play a big part in many cosmetic changes, primarily through the borrowing of words that reflects concepts having to do with cultures, but the structure of the language will remain the same. Another commenter mentioned syntax. That is an area to watch for, I agree. When syntax changes, structure begins to change. I think the watch will be worthwhile.

Either I have a abnormally fine tuned ear or you have never been to the Bronx, Boston, Charlotte, Atlanta, Noo Orleens or Pasadena, not to mention thousand others including Irish policemen in NYC and the Eastern Seaboard.

Not even to the cradle of Liberty listening to a family of Pennsylvania Dutch.

We can read Shakespeare but could he read us? A fairer test of linguistic change is forward intelligibility, and I am skeptical of anyone from four centuries ago understanding half of what they would read or hear in today's English. The materials basis of culture alone has changed radically, and the new concepts and words - or re-purposed words - would make modern language sound like a familiar gibberish.

And let's not delude ourselves int thinking pronunciations haven't changed tremendously over the past four centuries. They've changed significantly in my 66 years, and are changing faster than they were when I was young.

I think native English speakers are at a bit of a disadvantage in this subject, in that the range of English spoken, relative to certain other languages, can appear to be a bit narrow.

For example, I've been told that, even today, in certain parts of Holland the local Dutch spoken on one side of a major river might be incomprehensible to the Dutch spoken on the other.

And, I've experienced walking into a Latin American village, and finding the local Spanish to be so different that we could barely understand each other.

Regarding English, the only time I've experienced this is when listening to a group of east Londoners (sounded like Dutch to me), and to a couple of guys from Glasgow, which to me came across as spoken English in name only.

'Blade Runner' probably isn't the best example of science fiction movies using "dialogue that we'd recognize," since it explicitly invents "cityspeak" as a pidgin "street lingo" used by Deckard and other characters - Gaff in particular - on a number of occasions throughout the movie. Besides, the film is set in a near-future 2019, so continued use of English is common sense, not some narrative convenience.

Since you don't mention it, you may not be aware that "Sloosha's Crossin' an' Ev'rythin' After" (the "After the Fall" section of 'Cloud Atlas') is specifically a pastiche of or tribute to Russell Hoban's novel 'Riddley Walker,' which has probably the most extreme example of an eye-dialect rendering of an imaginary future version of English.

I know I'll be crucified by this opinion of mine but I would be dishonest if didn't take this opportunity to express it.

I've always been puzzled by the sort of adoration surrounding Ayn Rand.

I read her when I was in my teens or twenties and despite my agreement with her basic philosophy of "one-should-stand-on-one's-own-two-feet" she impressed me so little I almost clean forgot her.

I decided recently that I may have been wrong, being youthful and all that, old chap! and took the plunge to read her again.

Complete disaster: I went for the most iconic, Atlas Shrugged, and am having a hell of a time trying to finish it. Have to keep reading simultaneously a couple other books so I can bribe myself into not giving it up.

I once read the Bible from 1 to page 1387 (my edition) so I can't really be accused of being reading shy.

The only two other well known writers I've been unable to read were Karl Marx and a Nobel prize winner whose native language I speak.

So there must be some allergy of mine to Ayn Rand: every page I struggle through reminds me of a completely idiotic novel that was a best seller in the "new age" 80's(?): "the Celestine (or whatever) Prophecy".

I could never finish the bloody thing and apologies for my French as one used to say in the fifties.

In my peculiar world, Ayn Rand is as bad as the "Prophecy", dialects or no dialects, a subject I love.

Apologies to Ayn Rand's fans, but I couldn't hold any longer my repulse for her style and low brow story telling (funnily, I repeat, I rather side with most of her points of view).

Shrinking of French, Italian, and German as colonial languages => replaced with English.

Language of Computers, Technology and Science is English.

Asia converges to Mandarin with Pin Yin writing.

The Americas converge to Spanish.

The Arabs learn English as their ticket to immigration to leave an intolerant region and gain a hopeful future.

Swahili ends up in a museum.

_______________________________

Bad English is now the Universal World Language.
English is a particularly hard language to master.
There are far too many irregular pronunciations, irregular spellings, irregular verbs, and irrational rules.

___________________________

In a Post Apocalyptic World and in the rubble as the few survivors dust themselves off.
It they were long term thinkers and planning for an easy to learn, easy to understand, universal language
=> then consider a simple logical solution.

The first designer language, a language designed from scratch that learned from all the mistakes of other languages.
A simple, universal and scientifically designed language:

____________________________________
English was MS-DOS.
Now we have Windows and Graphic Interfaces instead of backslash commands.
And touch screen mobile computing.
And voice recognition.
And now conversant computers like Watson.
Would you return to MS-DOS?

Language needs a Metric System Internationale.
Esperanto is the closest thing to Metric.
Or you could stick with the English 'Inch'.

I don't agree that the English of today has not been shaped by "any intelligent process." Prior to the invention of the dictionary, language was much more fluid in spelling and meaning than is the case today. Standardization cannot prevent the language from evolving, but it can slow it down. Anyone who writes anything worth reading a few hundred years hence should think that a good thing.

Some of the best and most classical Spanish is found in isolated villages. It is modern, lower-class barrios in large cities that have some of the poorest/strangest/most inventive word-inventions and pronunciations.